Northrop Grumman Employees Receive NASA’s Highest Honors for Building the JWST | Hacker News Reader

Northrop Grumman Employees Receive NASA’s Highest Honors for Building the JWST

news.northropgrumman.com

97 pointsrm_ng33 comments

I know it's stupid, and at the time political, but I keep my certificate that came with my NASA award. As a kid who always wanted to be an astronaut, helping the space program enough that they give you a postit note that says "thank you" in government speak is still my highest honor.

One thing that will be memory holed because of the ultimate successful launch is just the MASSIVE overpromising on schedule and budget. Nearly criminal, in fact. Billions of dollars wasted and countless valuable missions that had to be sacrificed.

The team (I think under new management) eventually delivered a successful launch, so no one will remember.

I do think the final team who got it turned around and actually launched absolutely do deserve credit, I don’t want to deny that at all. But the opportunity cost was absolutely astounding.

(Will add sources)

EDIT: this 2018 article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/nasa-jam...

Remember it was supposed to launch in 2007 for just $500 million when conceived and 2010 and $1 billion (respectively) when approved.

Didn’t launch until the tail end of 2021 for $10 billion!

It's somewhat amusing to read this criticism on a website primarily populated by people in the software industry, which is hardly a paragon of accurate estimation and forecasting. Proportionate excesses (i.e. 10X over-budget) may not be the norm, but they are hardly rare, and they are always for projects far more prosaic than launching a telescope into space.

I work in the aerospace industry, not software.

Well great humble brag response! There are some known aerospace projects that ran over, but the software world has so many problems it is not embarrassing, it is just reality. I'm on a project with a goal of shipping in around 4 months, I estimate 12 months and my management chain does not want to hear it.

In this line of thought, in about 15 years, Boeing employees will get recognized for the incredible work on Starliner capsule. Wait, at this rate, it'll be closer to 25 years. But as the saying goes, good things come to those who wait and wait and wait and bloat the budget

Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast has an outlook on Boeing's CEO as a money generator to reach $10B cuts to investors before a decision to design more new aircraft for the future

Looking from the outside it completely sounds like a death march project and all the engineers and technicians who actually pulled it off deserve a big award and a long vacation. It's not their fault that execs overpromised.

And money well worth spent IMHO even 10 times that amount to increase our understanding of the universe say compared to spending on Twitter.

Orchestrating a very complicated remote deployment 1.5 million miles from earth with no do overs deserves some kudos.

Agreed buying Twitter is a waste, but the projects who lost out due to defense contractor incompetence were other science and astronomy missions. It is, in fact, understanding of our universe that suffers when borderline grift like this occurs.

In what world does the federal taxpayer fund Twitter?

Probably referring to capital (and human resources) allocation in general.

One is akin to flushing money down the toilet - the other one is science.

Well to be coy they do tend to fund Elon's other companies quite generously.

I mean that's all The Big Five MO, and NG is probably tied with Boeing for the worst. Their cost inflations in the last two decades especially are beyond the pale

>One thing that will be memory holed because of the ultimate successful launch is just the MASSIVE overpromising on schedule and budget.

All the bureaucrats and contractors who are part of the revolving door will remember it and not in a way that is good for us.

You shouldn't be downvoted. The revolving door thing is a real problem with private industry and underpaid government bureaucrats.

Managers and stakeholders will point out how JWST means that cost and schedule overruns don't matter and will soon be forgotten, no matter how large... As long as the project launches and operates. IMHO, this is bad. We'd be much better off cancelling highly underperforming projects early and reorienting resources towards competently run projects. Instead, we more often tend to throw good money after bad. A problem that has echoes in the US's infrastructure cost woes.

So off by price by a factor of 20

May be we should rethink the cost-plus structure of space/defense projects. There is an incentive for suppliers to run the billable-hours treadmill forever. See the F-35 program. I worked in defense and it was pretty much an internal joke/culture to "Just bill it to Sam".

There is probably a balance between incentivizing suppliers and keeping them afloat for defense reasons in the name of space exploration. We could probably do both at the same time and get tax payers more for their buck.

Like wouldn't it be awesome to ship 4x JWSTs for the same cost? We could get 4x more data and have redundancy in the project, etc. Or we could run 1 JWST project + X more projects to explore space, send probes, etc. for the same cost to tax payers. I am not proposing this and they're silly suggestions, just to give some color to opportunity costs that incurs in these overbloated gov projects.

Very well deserved. I thought the Snoopy award was the top award but apparently not. My grandfather is in the NASA hall of fame for the Apollo mission and was awarded a Snoopy. He was also part of Challenger but that's another story.

If NASA is anything like CDC, most awards are reserved for federal employees. Very rare for contractors (firms or individuals) to receive awards.

It's next to impossible in many agencies and departments. The reason given is that they are not allowed to show favoritism or clear support/preference to one given contracting company, and they say an award to a contractor would do that.

Congratulations to the whole team! I know this celebrates the achievements by select Northrop Grumman employees, but the JWST success deserves to be shared among all the teams: NASA, ESA CSA, U Arizona, Ball Aerospace, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

I work at the latter institution and I believe two individuals here were also awarded this honor.

Super well deserved. Incredible accomplishment of humankind.

Thanks to the everyone involved, you did a great job!

Congrats to the team that built JWST!

That reminds me of what Whitney Webb wrote and said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=w-d3jFIGxdQ&ab_c...

I thought the "silver snoopy" award was NASA's highest honor? I guess that is more of an astronaut award vs. a scientist/engineering award.

I posted above but my grandfather has one and he was a jet propulsion engineer. Maybe he doesn't have the "silver snoopy" and just a snoopy. I forget and he's passed but I distinctly remember a Snoopy on his wall as a kid.

That is so cool, I would treasure that should it ever fall in your possession. And it looks like its just silver snoopy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Snoopy_award

Do they get to take a victory lap around moon?

They would be send to the 1st Lagrange point

Well deserved.

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